The Telco Cloud Operations tier supports centralized data monitoring and logging for the telco cloud solution.

The Telco Cloud Operations tier monitors the Physical, Infrastructure, and Platform tiers. It collects information about various operations to provide observability into the platform efficiency and insights into networking infrastructure and SDE CaaS Kubernetes clusters.

Figure 1. Telco Cloud Operations Tier
Telco Cloud Operations Tier

Telco Cloud Bare Metal Automation for VMware Telco Cloud Platform™ automates the provisioning and configuration of physical servers, including server configuration and imaging.

Note:

The Operations Tier is optional in the Telco Cloud.

Network Inspection Tools

The Network Inspection Tools are network monitoring tool that collects and analyzes operational information about network data sources such as the Software Defined Networking, VI server, SDE CaaS deployments, and so on. Users can access this information through dashboards.

The Network Inspection tooling provides capabilities for application discovery, application visibility, and enhanced troubleshooting capabilities by collecting and analyzing inventory, metadata, and flow telemetry of the infrastructure traffic using sFlow/IPFIX. The Network Inspection tooling provides detailed traffic distribution patterns and real-time views of network traffic and patterns.

Major use cases and benefits of Network Inspection Tooling:

  • Application Discovery and visibility

  • Security and migration planning

  • Visual troubleshooting aids for day 2 operations

Note:

  • Network Inspection tooling is available only with Telco Cloud Platform Advanced.

Platform Logging

Platform logging collects unstructured data from the Telco Cloud Platform by using the syslog protocol. It has the following capabilities:

  • Connects to other Telco Cloud components such as the VI Server and hypervisor hosts to collect events, tasks, and alarm data.

  • Integrates with platform observability to send notification events and enable launch in context.

  • Functions as a collection and analysis point for any system that sends syslog data.

To collect additional logs, you can install an ingestion agent on Linux or Windows servers or use the preinstalled agent on specific products. Preinstalled agents are useful for custom application logs and operating systems such as Windows that do not natively support the syslog protocol.

As the SDE CaaS (Kubernetes) and Container adoptions are increasing in the Telco Cloud, Platform Logging can also act as the centralized log management platform for SDE CaaS clusters. Cloud Administrators can easily configure container logs to forward to the logging platform using industry-standard Open-Source log agents such as FluentD and Fluentbit. Any logs that the container pod writes to standard output (stdout) are sent to the logging platform by the log agent, with no changes to the CNF.

Platform Observability

Platform Observability is a unified AI-powered self-driving operations management platform for Private, Hybrid, and Multi-Cloud environments. It tracks and analyzes the operations of multiple data sources using specialized analytic algorithms. These algorithms help the platform Observability learn and predict the behavior of every object it monitors.

The platform observability supports collecting information through additional management packs. Some management packs are native to the platform observability and others are add-ons to provide relevant, contextual information about the Telco cloud components. The recommended management packs include:

  • Hypervisor and Software Defined Storage

  • Software Defined Networking

  • Virtual Infrastructure Management

  • Kubernetes Management Pack

Users access the information ingested by the observability platform by using views, reports, and dashboards. The platform is customizable to suit the telco cloud operations requirements, and it supports the creation of custom reports and dashboards.

Server Provisioning

Server Provisioning is used to deploy and bootstrap the server with the appropriate OS, in the case of the Telco Cloud, the server provisioning is used to deploy and configure hypervisors on the customer server of choice.

In addition to hypervisor deployment, the Server Provisioning performs server BIOS configuration management and ensures the deployment of correct firmware revisions to the BIOS, Network Interface Cards, and other components within the server.

Server Provisioning provides end-to-end server automation. Workflows can be connected to other Telco Cloud components such as Telco Cloud Automation to continue the deployment process after the Bare Metal provisioning process is completed.

Telco Cloud Service Assurance

The Platform Service Assurance is a holistic service assurance solution that allows Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and large enterprises to monitor and manage both the traditional physical infrastructure and new virtual and containerized network services together. The micro-services architecture enables flexibility and scale in the Telco Cloud Service Assurance platform.

Telco Cloud Service Assurance provides end-to-end service assurance capabilities across multiple domains including the Network underlay, the virtualized infrastructure, and service level monitoring of the 5G Core and RAN applications

Platform Service Assurance provides an automated approach to operational intelligence to reduce operational expenses, increase uptime, meet SLAs, and operationalize new services faster. It automatically discovers the topology of a complex, multivendor network including the physical, virtual, and services layers, and presents the user with a comprehensive, graphical topology view.

The Service Assurance platform provides the following capabilities:

  • Single pane of glass providing the CSP Operations teams with rapid insights

  • Automated root-cause analysis across service, physical, and virtualized networks

  • Auto-discovery of physical and virtual topologies

  • Dashboard and reporting

  • RAN assurance to consume fault and metric data from the RAN environment

  • Closed-loop remediation to take automated actions on infrastructure and service failures

  • Data collector SDK to allow the addition of custom CNF collectors

  • Observability for CaaS & xNF pipelines results